RedBeard’s Curious Life

After using my .22 rifle and AR-15 for a while, I got the itch for long-range precision shooting. The .22 cartridge is only accurate to 100 yards, and .223 is accurate to about 600 yards, although my AR-15 isn’t super-accurate. Drawing inspiration from movies and games, I wanted a rifle that could reach out to 1000 yards or more; for a bullet to remain accurate at long range, it must maintain supersonic speed because the transition to subsonic randomly and significantly destabilizes a bullet. Military snipers have used the M21, M24, and M110 to great success, and all of those rifles fire the .308 cartridge which is known to maintain supersonic speed beyond 1000 yards. The M24 is a bolt-action rifle, which is a design well regarded for its accuracy, whereas semi-auto actions like the M21 and M110 are typically regarded as good but not great. I wanted to have an M24 of my own, capable of hitting a dinner plate at 1000 yards.

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A highlight reel of the last decade of my life, it’ll be hard to top this one!

2000:
Started working on Destiny3D

2001:
Graduated high school
Worked at Fuddruckers
Started university at Georgia Tech

2004:
Internship at Autodesk

2005:
Graduated from GA Tech
Visited Hawaii and England
Started a job at Microsoft, on Direct3D
Started skiing regularly

2007:
Met Sarah

2008:
Visited Tokyo, Japan
Sarah moved in
Got a quaker parrot

2009:
Got into shooting guns, bought several
Started rock climbing
Transferred to Project Natal
Bought a house
Got a dog
Got a cat

Prior to my shotgun acquisition, I was also looking at handguns, as they are far more compact and suitable to carry on the street or in a car. I visited the local indoor range and tried a variety of rentals: 3 different calibers (9mm, .40, and .45), 5 handguns in each caliber, firing 10 rounds per handgun. My experience was that there was a ton of variety in the feel & performance of the available options, so it was tough trying to decide what I liked best. While not exactly scientific, my investigative exercise helped me pare down the selection to examine more thoroughly.

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After enjoying my two rifles (the .22 and AR-15) for a couple of months, I felt compelled to own a shotgun. The selection of shotguns is quite broad, with different calibers, barrel lengths, and action types, all with somewhat specific purposes in mind. Longer barrels are appropriate for longer-range shooting, and semi-auto actions are good for rapid fire while pump action is meant to be utterly reliable. My intention was to own a shotgun with a primary purpose of home defense, and a secondary purpose of fun at the range.

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Continuation of series. Previous post.

The .22 rifle is a nice gun, but I wanted something with more reach, more punch, and more reliability – something capable of taking large magazines and spending them at a relatively high rate of fire and with good accuracy. At the time, there was much rumor of the political powers reinstating an assault-weapons ban, and the rumor was strengthened by the attorney general outright proclaiming that goal. That rumor has since faded, but at the time I wanted to hedge that bet by buying something that could be banned, despite the price markup that dealers were enjoying. I simply had to get an AR-15 of reputable manufacture and features.

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I tried target shooting earlier this year, and discovered how exhilirating it can be to send some hot lead flying down-range. After taking an outing with some friends and trying various pistols and rifles at the local range, I decided I had to buy some of my own that were even better than the ones available for rental. Little did I know how much money I’d end up spending on this hobby in the course of 9 months.

I started with a .22 rifle, the Remington 597 in synthetic/stainless. The actual rifle I received was old stock sold as new, and I discovered it was 10 years old by searching for the serial number. This meant it came with the original-design plastic magazine, which has a tendency to jam up; a quick call to Remington had them sending me a new-design aluminum magazine for free that has been much more reliable. There are also a few rust spots on the barrel and magazine.

The rifle shoots nicely up to about 100 yards and can be taken to indoor pistol ranges without difficulty. I tried using it to complete a marksmanship evaluation, but wasn’t able to do the prone portion of the test due to backstop and target placement. Extrapolating the standing and sitting portions placed me into the top tier of performance, Expert, which made me feel pretty good about both myself and my equipment. My girlfriend also likes shooting this rifle because it has almost no recoil, is relatively quiet, and it has a very simple blowback recoil action. It does jam up once in a while, the most common being a bolt hold-open failure when the magazine is empty, and the occasional failure-to-feed. I wouldn’t trust my life to this rifle, but it’s fine for short-range target practice with cheap ammo.

Decent .22 ammo has been difficult to find since I bought the rifle, and I recently used up the last of the 525-round Federal value pack I bought along with the rifle back in March. I like this particular ammo because it comes in a hefty value pack, it has copper-plated hollow-point bullets, and the price is right around 4 cents per round. Thankfully, Cabela’s had a bulk offering at a decent price with free shipping, so I now have over 4000 rounds of .22 sitting around, begging to be used. I added a cheap Bushnell scope which makes it relatively easy to get nice tight groups at 50-100 yards off a bench rest. The most affordable piece of my arsenal, this .22 rifle has only cost me about $500 in total, including freight, ammo, and cleaning supplies.

Here’s a picture of me shooting the Remington 597 at the local indoor range, Wade’s.

The essential foundation of our entire economy is energy. Some other support is provided by material property, time, and intelligence, but those are worthless without energy. In the face of a dwindling energy supply, changing climate, and increasing population, strain on our economy will likely increase.

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I just had my Washington Mutual account moved over to Chase. The process was relatively painless for me, only having to change my username so that it includes a number, and I can now check my online banking through chase.com instead of wamu.com

The pleasantries cease there, though. My savings rate, which is the entire reason I even opened the account at Wamu back when they offered 5% APY, is now 0.01% at Chase, which is apparently the rate that Chase changes daily at their discretion. The Wamu rate had gradually decreased from the 5% mark, reaching 0.85% immediately before the Chase changeover, but that’s still a far cry from 0.01%! They also have the gall to label this account “CHASE PREMIER SAV” which I suppose is meant to be somehow better than their standard offering.

In addition to the non-existent “savings” interest rate, I also can no longer use MS Money to easily and automatically centralize my banking information unless I pony up $10 PER MONTH to allow Money to download statements automatically. They now label my checking account “FREE EXTRA CKING” and when I fill in the missing letters, I’m more inclined to think I’m getting extra fucking rather than checking.

So now I ask myself, why would I even consider keeping this account open? My savings are accruing interest at roughly the same rate as a piece of stale bread, and I can no longer use the banking software that I have used for the past 3 years without ongoing additional cost.

Conclusion: fuck off and die, Chase.

Just over a year ago, I lost my mother to cancer, lymphoma specifically. RIP Jane Campbell, 1955-2007.

Obviously it’s taken me a while to kind of recover, and I think writing something about the process might help me some more. I’ve actually refrained from writing other blog posts because I didn’t want to let this pass without committing something to written words. I don’t aim to depress myself or others, although I’m sure a few tears will escape my eyes while writing the next several paragraphs.

She fought the cancer and endured treatment for many months before it overcame her. Nothing quite compares with the experience of picking up the phone one morning and having your sobbing father say you don’t have much time to say goodbye. She proved wrong the doctors’ estimate of 2 days, more than doubling that in the face of fatal lung failure, congested with metastasized tumors. We ended up having sufficient opportunity to say our goodbyes, talk about fond memories, settle affairs, and partly work through our grief before even completely losing her. It was a grueling several days in the ICU with no humidity, not knowing when the time might come or what to do afterwards.

I will definitely miss a number of things about my Mum, especially her strong character and caring nature. We had plenty of disagreements and fallings-out, but we never held a grudge against one another, and she was always so pleased with the accomplishments I’ve made in life: good grades, nice friends, fun & well-paying jobs, and all the other little things. She didn’t micro-manage my life but rather left me to my own devices, although there were times when I felt she and my dad made decisions for me that weren’t in my best interests – going to school out of state while moving across the country left me feeling pretty lonely, but I came out of that in the end and met some cool people along the way. She always had compelling tales from her childhood, like stealing the neighbor’s cat, riding the train to school, her brother heading off to boarding school, living in various exotic places like Singapore, and many others that presently elude my memory.

She was rather different from me, but those are probably the things that stood out the most to me. She had a really nice signature, always identical, flowing smoothly through sharp lettering and annunciated with a dominant but relaxed J. She had a knack for making friends, easily eliciting life stories from people mere minutes after meeting them; we were always on good terms with the local Chinese restaurant because she’d befriended the manager. Our cat always loved her, perhaps because she always fed him the good stuff, but he was always following her through the house or curled up by her side. She wasn’t the epitome of health (she was overweight and had high blood pressure and diabetes), but one of the things she expressed regret for was her lack of physical activity – she stopped the swimming she had enjoyed in her youth and the walking she often did around town in England – and she urged me to take better care of myself than she had of herself.

A number of my significant life experiences have been shared exclusively with my Mum. We visited England the summer I graduated from university and took a blitz tour of London in a day that gave me many good photos. I would have ended up in a jail cell had she not come to bail me out after getting arrested for running a stop sign. She visited me at Georgia Tech and we ate steak for Thanksgiving dinner in downtown Atlanta, when the holiday would otherwise have been dull and boring on the deserted campus. Living in Epsom while my dad worked in Scotland during the weekdays, she played a huge role in my early development. My brother tagged along on some of those, but my mother was obviously the dominant factor in all of them.

It’s clear to see that I’d be in a very different place without my mother’s support and guidance, and it still makes me sad that I won’t be able to further reward her with the various experiences most people eventually get to enjoy. She’ll never have the chance to babysit her grandchildren, or even to know their mother. She won’t ever enjoy a retirement in a warm, relaxing place. She won’t befriend yet another Chinese restaurant manager. She won’t visit her friends and family in England again, or travel to Italy where my brother was born. Clearly she’s not the only one missing out here – all of those things involve numerous other people who have been robbed of the possibility of knowing this lovely woman.

Before I had WordPress all set up, I was still ranting away. Please take a moment to reflect on those old rantings. Back then my primitive php skills, combined with massive spambot attacks, meant you could not comment on them, but this fancy blog system suffers less from those problems and you should post any commentary here. Some of those rants have lost their lustre, but the essence of some still survives. I’ll give a brief rundown of how I view each of them now after a couple years have passed:

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